The development of the internet as a means of obtaining information has also seen the appearance of its use as a means of purchasing products, with the most notable being perhaps the launching of Amazon.com in 1995 and of eBay in 1996. Although online shopping has grown to the point where a large percentage of businesses now host an internet web-page and market directly to consumers online, the ability of a consumer to shop is still largely dictated by his or her own awareness of a particular store and its associated web-site, or their skill in “surfing” the web.
Some inventions within the prior art have sought to improve the online shopping experience, but still fall short of providing the participant a realistic home shopping experience, compared to the method and apparatus disclosed herein. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 7,072,860 to Kakuta for “Electronic Shopping Mall” discloses a straight-forward system for “an electronic shopping mall that includes one or more virtual shops and is provided on a communication network to offer and sell products or services to a customer in response to an access provided by the customer via the communication network . . . .” However, the bulk of the Kakuta disclosure is directed to a discount calculation parameter and methods of incentivizing a customer to purchase based on a discounted price, and a means of negotiating, without serving to enhance the actual online shopping experience.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,266,511 to Teshima for “Method and System for Operating a Virtual Shopping Mall . . . ” discloses greater detail as to the shopping environment. The Teshima virtual mall comprises a seller registering virtual goods by submitting virtual goods information and the provision of image data using “a picture reading unit, which obtains image data of the real goods from a picture of the real goods brought in to the terminal base by the seller.” While this provides an improvement to generic online shopping at each individual store's web site, the method adds very little in the way of enhancing the shopping experience for a user being at home on his/her computer. All the Teshima method essentially achieves is the co-location of various virtual shops.
Similarly, U.S. Pat. No. 7,725,362 to Weathers for “Virtual Group Shopping Mall” discloses a system wherein the mall is “receiving a request from the user for providing sales information of the product available in the on-line shopping mall . . . ” and where the sales information may include a brand name, and a picture of the product and the online store selling the product. The Weathers' invention, like most others, is directed towards the basic query, product information, pricing, and the sale. The Weathers shopping mall, just like the other inventions, does not serve to engage the shopper in the actual shopping experience. The inventions are truly “virtual.” The invention herein seeks to accomplish some of those same goals in accommodating a consumer's online purchases, but does so by also providing a real and dynamic shopping experience. The online mall herein is not just “virtual,” but may be the combination of a real interactive shopping experience being conducted remotely, or may be a pure virtual experience, as with the other prior art inventions, or it may be a combination of those two shopping experiences, as disclosed hereinafter.